With conventional toasters, when a slice of toast or pastry gets lodged in the toast chamber during toasting, there generally is no fail-safe device for shutting off power to the heating elements. This can result in the toast or pastry being overcooked or burnt, and more importantly, can result in more hazardous occurrences, such as a fire.
Many currently available toasters rely on a timing circuit to release a solenoid or electromagnet which in turn releases the bread racks, along with a set of mechanical contacts for controlling voltage to the heating elements. The problem with these toasters occurs when the bread or pastry becomes jammed at the bottom of the toast rack and the electrical contacts are not sufficiently opened to turn off the heating elements.
Further, with existing toasters, the toast lowering mechanism is usually formed by bread racks, one per slot, connected at one end to a yoke assembly which slides vertically on a metal rod, and a knob for actuating the same. The opposite end of each bread rack is guided imprecisely in large slots punched out in the metal housing. This design translates to a loose, imprecise and noisy operator control.
Further, with many toasters there is no adequate display for indicating the shade of the toast, that is, such displays are not precise.
Still further, most slots for food are rectangular on existing toasters. However, with bread items which do not have planar sides, such as bagels, it is often desirable to toast only one side of the bagel. Currently, some toasters do attempt to offer this feature, using a mechanical lever to switch off certain sides of the slots, but this requires the user to consider which orientation the toast or bagel is placed in the toaster, and therefore, the likelihood of negative results is high. Therefore, even if a toaster includes a control to allow the user to choose not to toast both sides of a bagel, there would be no obvious proper orientation for loading the bagel corresponding to the control, so that this would limit the usefulness of the feature to the user.
In addition, conventional toasters do not permit non-toasting functions such as defrosting food items or reheating food items after toasting.
Lastly, conventional toasters do not take into account differences in the original state of the item to be toasted, such as frozen foods, i.e., frozen waffles, and non-frozen foods, i.e., bread.